Hey, Scott, how's it going?
Welcome. I hope your stream went well the other day. I wasn't able to make it, but I will be checking out the recording, and I saw that you published your Brave video, which I will also be checking out and sharing. Hey, guys. Good afternoon.
Yeah, you're a little fuzzy, but we can hear you.
I'm feeling a little fuzzy today.
I had a lot of trouble sleeping this week feels fuzzy.
So yes, Scott, I saw that you published your, your brave video. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I will today and I will share it on Twitter and all over.
Let me know your feedback everybody if you get a chance to watch it kind of what you think I mean there's, there's so much fun talk that I just want to give like a general overview.
Our feedback with you and, you know, you're so right there's so much to cover with brave that starting high levels great and then if you ever end up wanting to do some more specific that and brave content we can also help you.
Good to see you here. I'm sorry.
My fellow pudgy pudgy bud.
So, who are we waiting for from this morning.
Yeah, I can remember which one of them was going to be on.
Hope everyone's doing well today.
We'll get a couple minutes to get a hold of our guests here.
Good. Yeah, it's Friday, it's Friday so ready for the weekend honestly, it's been a very good week.
Running out of steam but I am.
Because we did speak to them earlier this week had to play video games.
We got the traffic out of here.
Hey battery, you mentioned the length of the space in the discord if it's not there already.
Did anyone jump in on the poker earlier this morning.
No, I didn't get a chance. I'm also not much of a poker player but did any of you guys. I get it.
I'm not much of a poker player here that's why I didn't last very long.
Yeah, I didn't get a chance I've been so busy, but yeah, I mean it's fine I'm not very good at it either but it's fun.
I'm just gonna park that account in here.
We have basic attention token here too.
Who do we have with us from shrapnel today I see the account is here. Welcome. Thank you for coming.
Yeah, of course. Hey, what's up everyone. It's sneaky Che, aka Alex from the shrapnel account so excited to be here with the back community.
Thank you so much for, you know, getting connected and just being so open to collaborating with us over here at shrapnel. We're obviously super huge fans like personally of, you know brave as a browser just because like we use the product.
So super excited to, you know, get introduced here with you guys talk more love, you know these more intimate settings happy to have, you know, q amp a and it just be like a dialogue anything you guys want to know about shrapnel.
But yeah, looking forward to, you know, introducing you guys to shrapnel hopefully answer any questions you might have about us.
Obviously, I'm in love with brave and everything that you guys are doing happy to learn more about what's going on there and if we can, you know, highlight anything so excited for the spaces and just, you know, chat together.
Wow, Alex welcome so happy so happy that you're here. Thank you for that intro. I'm actually happy that it's nice to have an informal chat.
Yeah, but we actually spoke on the phone earlier this week and then you were saying that you're going to try to find someone to come on the space with us. You weren't sure if you're going to do it, but I'm happy that you came on.
And your energy that you just brought to the room is so nice you sound so like chipper and clear headed today and we're I think we're all a little sleepy so you just gave me a pick me up.
Oh yeah, it's not not my first space of the day I'm ready to go.
That's awesome. What space had you already done today on such a good careers in web three mega spaces with one of my favorite up and coming projects. They're called Eclipse NFT.
And they're basically a professional development networking group. They do a lot of sort of just professional workshops, career development for those specifically looking to advance in web three and so I just think that it's a really nice service that they're doing.
Happy to support them and the panel today was just bangers in terms of people who have, you know, jobs in web three just telling their stories of, you know, how they actually got to their position.
I'm sure that you have a very unique story as well of how you, you know, became the sort of liaison for the back community and so it's always just so much fun hearing about these crypto stories.
And, you know, everyone's just so supportive and collaborative that it was just a really good way to start the day for me.
Oh, wow. Yeah, I actually started off just making memes.
Yeah, that led to the great community role.
Yeah, well, you know, web three is like, it's just emerging, right? And so, and so is like kryptian and blockchain.
I'm not sure if the space is being buggy, but if I only lose a good alternative.
Is the space being buggy? I feel like we keep talking over each other, so it might be.
Spaces are always buggy. It's a feature, I think.
Brave talk, which is like, it's kind of like Zoom, except we're out and you're listening in on your conversations.
We have all our regular memes on there, but the good thing about space is that it's like a public. So, you know, people can walk in.
That's it. That's it. We like the spaces because we can bring in people from outside of our, our usual community. So we try to bear with the bugs.
Okay, so Adam, I think, or Batterne, we keep, I don't know, maybe one of us wants to try reconnecting quick, quick, because I do think that there's some kind of lag.
Oh, okay. I think it looks like he's going to rejoin. Okie dokie. But let's kick off. And the room usually fills up as we, as we go on.
So welcome back everybody to another Friday Space with the Bat Community.
In the Batcave with Alex, aka, or Sneaky, aka Alex, Alex, which do you prefer? Let us know from Shrapnel.
Would you prefer being called Alex or?
It honestly is what's ever easiest for you, Sneaky, Alex. It's all the same, even Shrapnel. You can just call me, you know, the, the account name as well.
Okay, maybe I'll try alternating this.
And I'll let Alex tell us all about Shrapnel, but just quickly, it is a competitive, or will be a competitive AAA extraction shooter game on PC, where true ownership and real world value are offered to players for the first time, featuring skill based play, creative modding tools, a community marketplace, and integration with blockchain technology.
So lots to learn, lots to cover today. They're actually doing a lot of really exciting things.
We spoke with the Shrapnel team earlier in the week, thanks to Crypto Dojo, who is here. Hey, Crypto Dojo, thank you for setting us up.
And yeah, I'm excited to share with you what we've been learning about Shrapnel. So we always do a little community intro for anybody who may tune in later to the recording.
So we'll just run through that quickly. Whether you're a regular listener here or a first time visitor, we are thrilled to have you as always.
We are the Bat community and we are all about basic attention token.
Sorry, I'm just setting Bat urn up again here. Okay, there we go. He's back.
And Bat is an Ethereum based rewards token integral to the Brave web browser.
And if you don't know Brave, you should download Brave. What are you doing? Brave is a fast and privacy focused web browser that blocks YouTube and other third party ads by default, so no extensions needed.
It rewards users with Bat for opting in to seeing ads that are privacy respecting and then allows users to support their favorite content creators or causes with on-chain Bat contributions.
And the Brave browser also comes preloaded with a ton more privacy and web3 features like a private search, an AI summarizer, an assistant, private video conferencing, VPN, multi-chain crypto wallet.
There's really so much to explore. And you should definitely check it out if you're interested at brave.com.
And if you want to learn about features, brave.com slash features. And for more on Bat, you can head on over to basicattentiontoken.org after the spaces.
Now we're going to go around the room and introduce everybody on the panel. So I'll kick us off since I already have the mic in hand.
My name is Jenny. I am your host today. I am speaking from the Bat community account.
I have been with Brave since late 2017, early 2018. I came from the community. I, you know, was in the Bat Slack before the Bat token launch.
And, you know, so I've been around for a little while. And today I focus on running our Bat Ambassadors program and I focus on building out partnerships that further Bat's growth and adoption.
So that's me. And now I will hand it off to Drew for his intro.
Hey, everybody. Thanks for being on Alex. Excited for this one. Learn a little bit more about shrapnel, what you guys got going on.
But I'm Drew. I've been in the Bat community for, you know, I would say like five years now and then started doing these about a couple of years ago and going from there, working with Jenny on community partnerships and things like that.
So things basis. Yeah. And also wanted to say we've got a few of the heavy extraction packs from shrapnel. Thank you very much.
So we'll be giving out to some listeners throughout. We'll kind of take some snapshots throughout the space today.
And then, of course, weekly we have a POAP that Guillerm puts together that you can claim in our Discord, which is discord.gg slash Bat brigade.
So you can check that out as well. So that's it for me. I guess I'll shoot over to Battern. Man, go ahead.
Or is he not back on yet? Guillerm, you can go, I guess.
Sounds good. Hello, everyone. My name is Guillerm and I am the community slash brave designer slash artist or illustrator.
And usually I hate with the community engagement posts and graphics and whatnot and suggest today's POAP.
And if Battern is not here, I see that Paul is not here either. So I'll pass it back to Jenny.
Thanks, Jay. So Battern is trying to reconnect here. Hang on a second. I'm just going to give him a minute if he can get back on. Battern, can you hear us?
Yeah, so big problems in the spaces on my end today. I'm Battern. I'm sorry I'm making memes.
Now I help Jenny lead our ambassador program, helping spread the good word of Battern Brave across cultures and platforms. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye.
Awesome. Thank you. And yeah, Paola is off today. So we'll skip over her intro. Also, Godson from our team is here but in the audience listening today. So hey, Godson.
And oh, Crypto Dojo, since you set this up for us, Crypto Dojo is one of our wonderful Bat ambassadors. Why don't you give us a quick intro?
Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm really excited about this. Yeah, so I'm Scott. I do a lot of crypto and blockchain education. I've been a part of the Bat community and Brave for almost two and a half years now, I believe.
And I just love what Corinne is doing for privacy and security and just moving things forward and what free space. And yeah, I'm just excited to be here. So thanks for letting me jump on and say hi.
Yeah, of course. Thank you for hooking this up. And also, everyone here, Scott is a creator and makes tons of awesome content, educational content on Crypto, recently made a video about Brave.
Go check it out on his Twitter and then you can get to his channel from there. But yeah, thank you so much for that great intro.
And then last but not least, we have our wonderful guest from shrapnel. Alex, welcome. I know we already did a quickie intro at the beginning, but formally, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and your journey to shrapnel and then what you currently do at shrapnel?
Yeah. Hey, guys, it's Sneaky Che Alex from shrapnel. I'm part of the Web3 team here. I've been with shrapnel only actually since November in an official capacity, but I have been with the team as one of their vendors for over a year before that.
So ultimately, like was working with them through like a third party. And then they were like, oh, hey, this guy's like pretty into us. And he, you know, talks about the project pretty good. Let's bring him over. And so that's how I got connected over at shrapnel.
So we're a triple A first person extraction shooter. We're built on the avalanche blockchain. We are completely gasless and free to play experience so that if you go find us in the epic game store, download us, you can jump right into gameplay, start shooting up some people without having to know about anything like wallet, crypto, whatever nonsense else, you can just play us as a straight video game.
Well, I do a shrapnel is live services marketing, which is just like a more polished way of saying Web3 partnerships and collab manager. So I'm really out there making sure that all of our partnerships with various KOLs, influencers, guilds, organizations are able to run smoothly and cohesively in the right direction to ultimately push the shrapnel brand and awareness forward.
So, you know, our goals right now is basically if you're in Web3 and you can speak English, we want you to have heard of shrapnel and we'll have done our job. And so really right now we're on a scorched earth mission to really educate the world about what we're building in anticipation of our early access, which is going to be our first publicly playable build of shrapnel.
And just like you said, you know, we're giving out a ton of extraction codes. And I think, you know, I'm happy to, you know, depending on how Drew and others feel here of like literally we can we can do extraction packs for basically everyone in this audience.
If you're comfortable with it, I think, you know, if you want to do it, like, go ahead and comment on the room of, you know, something that you hear exciting during the spaces.
If you want to repost the room, those could be good ways for us to track winners to give these extraction packs to. And let me tell you guys, you are definitely going to want one of these extraction packs, not only because they give you early access to shrapnel to play the game, but we're giving away a shit ton of our token just to come play early access.
And so if you go win this win this extraction pack for free, literally, you can come play our game, win some of our token, get some free money and you literally haven't, you know, put up anything from yourself other than participating here in the back community and just checking us checking out our game to see if it's a good time.
So anyway, that was a super long winded intro. Happy to dive in more to it with specific questions. But thank you so much for inviting me, Jenny, and thanks everyone up here for having us.
Amen. Oh, my God, that was so awesome. And there's so much to unpack in what you said. But thank you for that wonderful background. And I had no idea that you were so new to the team, but that is awesome.
It sounds like you're already, you know, so comfortable in the role and doing a great job. So I love what you said about how you are currently on a scorched earth mission to educate the world about shrapnel.
I love that. And I totally feel comfortable giving out extraction packs to everybody in this audience. Everybody likes and, you know, shares this, shares the space link.
And yeah, we'll make sure to get one to you. I don't know, Drew, I think you may have a little more detail than me around the distribution of these. So I don't know if you want to chime in.
Yeah, yeah, that sounds awesome. I really appreciate that. So everybody, if you want to retweet and share the space and will somehow some way get an extraction pack over to you.
So thanks, man. I appreciate that, Alex. It's awesome.
And I'll send you a full list, a new list of pack codes as well, if you tell me how many we have to give out based on comments and reposts.
Okay, we'll do. Oh, my God. That's so exciting. Thank you so much. This is awesome. Everyone throw down an emoji react for that. You're excited.
So now there's no excuse. After this space, you have to go and you have to try shrapnel. You will have an extraction pack or you'll have to join the early access or whatever the instructions are. We're going to learn. We're going to learn. That's why we're here.
So, okay, let's back it up for a second. I know that you're a more recent addition to the team, Alex, but can you walk us through if you know about the inception of shrapnel and what inspired the team to create the game?
Oh, I love the inception story because this thing is like old like I'm dating myself. Thankfully, I'm not as I'm a little older than this, but literally some of the people at our company are younger than the idea of shrapnel the game.
And so literally shrapnel.com, the domain, our CEO, Mark Long, purchased it in 1995. So he's had this idea for quite a bit of time. So, you know, people ask us like, oh, hey, how much was the domain? It was actually pretty cost efficient. I think back then.
And so back in the day, actually, in the 90s as well, the shrapnel story originated through a comic series, actually, who our CEO Mark Long actually wrote that with the co-founder of Rockstar Games, the people who make like the GTA franchise.
And so he made this storyline. He had this idea about just like lore, right? And then I think a few years later, they figured out like, okay, hey, how do we want to explore this game in a video game?
And it was really about having a moddable extraction shooter. They thought it would be a really good place for this. But unfortunately, the technology really wasn't in place at that time to be able to create this grand vision of a game that they wanted.
In terms of it being moddable, right? And you're seeing this moddability happen within Fortnite now with their UEFN and map creator grant program where they've opened up a map editor to their community so that you can mod your Fortnite experience.
We've created our own called Trapnite, where we've actually recreated shrapnel in Fortnite.
But anyway, it was very, very important to have this modability in place, but then also to have the incentives aligned as well so that modability could be rewarded.
And that only really came to fruition once blockchain technology proliferated. And then it was like, okay, hey, I think we can actually take this vision together with what we actually want to do in the technology and make it a reality.
And so this was back in like 2020, 2019 is when the team started sort of forming and getting together. Our team, thank goodness, like these guys are way more experienced at game design than me.
And like, they are just absolute phenomenal superstars. I am so enthusiastic every time I talk to them because literally I can just gas them up forever.
These guys are industry OGs, decades and decades of experience, creating flagship temple titles at places like Microsoft, specifically Xbox, obviously, Amazon as well.
And so like, it's funny, we jokingly call our gaming team like the Microsoft cabal has like infiltrated web three, because like literally all of our dudes are X Microsoft, like our head of blockchain was the VP at Microsoft who started their entire blockchain division.
He ultimately went over to consensus was a senior VP over at consensus before he moved over to us. But besides him, also a lot of our team is from not only Xbox and Amazon, but also HBO interactive.
And that's actually where our CEO Mark Long came out of. So it's like this hodgepodge of both incredible game designers and incredible story towers tellers so like the people from HBO interactive.
They worked on really, really small shows like Westworld and Game of Thrones, and the people who came from Xbox have experience with paradigm shifts like the head of studio was telling me the day it was like, Oh, hey, you know, Alex, you know, this whole web three thing.
It reminds me a lot of back when we were launching Xbox live at Microsoft, and we were going from the transition of, you know, LAN experiences on consoles to multiplayer online experiences.
And that totally changed the entirety of the gaming landscape. And I'm like, bro, you just casually dropped that you were on the team that that brought Xbox live online, what the heck.
And so then our team also in terms of their game design credits, right? They've been on titles such as Halo, Call of Duty, Ghost of Tsushima, and our core like creative team, head of head of studios, all of those guys, they really cut their teeth together on the Bioshock series.
And that's actually where like, you know, they formed these relationships to say like, okay, hey, you know, we really like working together. And so once Bioshock Infinite wrapped, they ultimately needed another project together.
And so this is what came sort of to prominence from all of these different individuals talking together and coming together of being like, hey, what can we work on? What is the time right on? And it's like, okay, hey, let's do shrapnel.
And so then shrapnel is now born. And so we have this great tech, we have this great, you know, game team, we have this great story team.
So what is shrapnel exactly? And so the story of shrapnel is that it's set in the near future of Earth. Maybe, you know, we're commercialized asteroid and space mining at this point.
But what happens is there's a catastrophic accident where an asteroid for some reason veers off course and collides with the moon. That's actually the profile picture that you're seeing on my page right now.
And so then when that happens, it rains debris across the Earth that we call shrapnel. And ultimately, it throws the world into chaos, obviously, because of the immense damage caused, but then also because
within this shrapnel that's raining down around the world, we actually discover a new space element called sigma.
And what sigma does is it unlocks all of the keys to quantum physics and quantum mechanics within our reality. So it becomes very, very quickly like the most valuable resource within the planet.
And so really, the world order starts to shape around this newly defined element. There's weapons that are being created, you know, based off it.
World governments are competing with, you know, private organizations, whether they be criminal or corporate, and it's all this big battle over this new element sigma and trying to control it.
And so your mission as an operator in our game is to go into one of these sacrifice zones on a contract, and you're basically contracted to go extract as much sigma as you can.
And so you're playing against other players who are also have the same mission of going into the sacrifice zone, right, where there's all this destruction and debris to go find this rare element.
And ultimately, throughout the course of the game session, they're going to be randomized sigma storms that deposit this sigma. And it's your decision if you want to go ahead and collect that or stay away from it because obviously other players are going to potentially want to collect that.
And that could be a hotspot for confrontation, you know, or you can, you know, take the strategy of like, hey, maybe I'll just get some sigma by killing a player later in the game and taking it from him.
But this sigma is so important to our lore as well as the gameplay because it's actually what differentiates our gameplay experience from another FPS like an escape from Tarkov, or something that's you know, counter strike, which is just strictly gameplay.
And so within the game itself, you are actually going to have what we call sigma abilities. So when you're collecting sigma within a game session, you're actually powering up the sigma abilities that are special combat abilities that should help you
when there are later game session confrontation so that if you have your sigma ability charged up, you're going to be in a much better position than if someone doesn't have it.
And so some of the sigma abilities that we have are things like sigma jump, where you're able to like jump literally on top of buildings, either away from people or to get a good vantage point to have a better position in a gunfight.
You have the we have what we have a sigma push, where you can push, you know, sigma projectiles away from you in terms of if there's items that are near you like boxes, you can push those in a direction or even if there's an opponent that is like right up on you and you need to reload.
You want to get them away from you can, you know, push them away as well as what we've seen, which is interesting is projectiles in the game as well.
Like we noticed that during play tests, if like a grenade would land by someone, people will use their sigma push to make that projectile go away from them and not take damage from that.
So sigma itself is very important in the gameplay session to power these sigma abilities, but then also your goal ultimately is to extract and take out that sigma from the gameplay session and be rewarded for that.
So, sorry, you know, super long winded sort of answer there about what is shrapnel, the origin story, and sort of a little bit of what you can expect from the lore and gameplay but if there's anything you want me to, you know, double click on there and dive into deeper happy to do so.
But I think that was plenty.
No, what a what a fascinating origin story history background, you know, game world that you're building and also what a stacked team it sounds like.
Also, I love that you shared earlier that the shrapnel domain was originally purchased in 1995, like, what a such a long time ago, and also coincidentally that is the same year that our CEO and co founder Brendan Ike invented JavaScript.
Oh, that's just fun fact.
But actually, Jenny, can I ask on that. So, was it something like okay you had this idea, you know, got the domain 1995, and it's kind of sat on it for all these years or what was going on between 95 and 2019.
Basically between 95 and 2019 was mostly just storytelling. So we've got comic books, and we got stories that our CEO is so excited to explore, not just obviously through comics but him being from his TV production background we've actually
already created like a short live action that's on our YouTube and stuff you go check it out if you want to, but you know his his sort of grand vision right is to have TV shows movie franchises really explore shrapnel beyond just the
gameplay itself and I think that's where his true passion sort of lie.
Cool. So these guys just building building that story and the lore and all that's going to be coming out this kind of being built throughout that time. Cool. That's, that's amazing. Interesting story.
So, I want to back it up real quick for anyone who hopped in late because the room has filled up quite a bit since the beginning.
Just to clarify for folks who just joined shrapnel the game is upcoming, not yet launched. However, we will be giving away during this space, or after the space, some extraction packs and actually maybe Alex now would be a good time to dive into like exactly
what the extraction packs are and what they enable users to do in terms of like early testing, etc.
Definitely so, just like you said, I think we want to like reposts and comment on the room. If you are interested in that extraction pack.
And so what that extraction pack does give you is that gives you early access into shrapnel, and that's good for the entirety of early access and it will be required to get into the game.
So for example, our early access is going live in a few weeks here is what we're expecting. And once that goes live, we expect it to remain open as early access for many, many months, you know, six months plus potentially.
And so, you know, if you're coming later into that, you know, period in terms of like coming in in March or April, you're still going to need one of these extraction pack codes in order to play the game until we fully open it up to be free to play.
And so what these codes and they contain are they're actually just codes themselves these extraction packs you go to shrapnel.com to redeem this code to your account and that that then shows that your account is now entitled to be able to play early access.
And then each of the packs as well contains some different goodies that you can go ahead and check out shrapnel.com to sort of see the full breakdown.
But, you know, the biggest differentiation is the light packs to the heavy packs, the heavy packs are more expensive they retail for $100 and they're going to have the most sort of cosmetics and gear and so I think those come with like 16 weekly drops where over
a course of 16 weeks, different items gear cosmetics is going to be airdrop deposited however you want to, you know, say it magically appear in your player inventory.
Once those are ultimately created, and then you get to choose what you do with those items again, you know us being an NFT game all of those cosmetics in our game or NFTs we're going to have an in platform marketplace where if you want to sell skins by skins, do whatever
you want with them. You get to do so because that's your prerogative of actually owning your digital in game assets and so you know we're really just trying to empower players there.
We're going to showcase what blockchain technology can enable and so again those extraction packs are going to be required.
We're going to be giving away a ton here in the space we're going to be doing more with the back community as well so if you're interested, be sure to hop into their discord, be following their Twitter as well, because there's going to be a lot of different ways
to get these extraction packs throughout the entirety of our early access not just, you know, these next couple weeks so hopefully you know even when the game comes out and you're sitting on the sidelines and you're like oh hey wait I really want to jump in now.
We're still going to be, you know, giving away extraction packs through back community and others to get you all in there.
I have a follow up question so the truck now extraction packs will be just for the early access or will also be needed as a token gate to actually play the game later on once it's released.
Yeah, no, so it's only for early access. And so, you know, what you're paying for is essentially being able to play the game early and then also all those cosmetics and gear.
But again, we're completely free to play game, so that, and that's intentional, so that you know if you're just an FPS gamer.
And you find us through our web to marketing because you see a streamer playing it you go into the epic game store download the game, jump right into shrapnel without having to deal with like the tokens and the NFT and whatever stuff.
The extraction pack sales really, you know, focus toward the web three user focus toward like someone who wants to pay for early access and straight up guys.
Okay, I, I have to caveat and catch this and level set for expectations because freaking other game design studios out there and publishers are like yo we're pushing out early access y'all and early access is literally just their full game launch and you're like,
I don't know if you're using that terminology right okay and so literally guys if you want a polished fully optimized gameplay experience, wait for our public launch do not come into early access because literally our early access is just that it's like literally pre alpha where
just to also give you some insights into what you can expect right early access is only going to be one map and that one map is not even going to be fully visually textured and detailed.
It's going to be 90% in what we call a gray box environment, where literally it's just that it's a lot of gray boxes so all the walls are gray, all of the, the vehicles items whatever in the game are going to be gray and not sort of you know pretty
visually designed and that's by intention, because it costs a lot less from our side on the game design team right to reposition buildings to reposition hallways and layouts within buildings.
If we haven't, you know, committed to those artistic details and just time and effort to do that.
So, really, this is like literally the first look of playing shrapnel there's going to be bugs there's going to be glitches it's not going to be pretty it's not going to be optimized people are going to be complaining, but it's going to give our community
the opportunity to shake what ultimately that end form is going to look like because they're going to be able to tell us hey, we're having a lot of fun with this, like these aspects right okay hey, let's double down on those let's amplify the fun.
These other stuff is not as much fun we're we're annoyed by this we're not having fun we're frustrated. Okay okay hey we're hearing this from the community maybe we need to re look at that re tweak it before we go to full access.
So, really trying to level set expectations here is like hey guys, typically for game design, how are how you know people on our team have approached in the past and in traditional studios is literally it's like a three to five year black box process where
you're creating outside of public view totally private, and then you just sort of open up the box to the world when it's ready. And so our team is, you know, this is totally new to them in terms of bringing in.
Players and communities so early into the game design process and really it's like they're like it's not ready we don't have like you know it's but it's like, you know, we want something to show to the players to show to the community.
And so we're really excited just to get that out but at the same time right, we know that there's going to be bugs and glitches and all that, but we're really excited because for 20% of the map.
We're actually are fully designing it out detailing out rendering it so that you can get a little bit of a taste of what the full shrapnel experience is going to be like and so we call that the beautiful corner.
It's literally just like from floor, all the way to the sky of just like skyscrapers that are totally detailed out. Our first map is based on Japan Shibuya Square.
Some of the game team not myself. I'm very jealous got to go on site there to actually you know take pictures and get a feel for for what where we were going to actually make the map location and so the map is is a lot of based in reality.
And a lot of people who say like you know they've been to the place or like oh well dang like I can't believe you also have this there it's so realistic but then.
So, so anyway, that's all to say. This is a very very true alpha early access. If you guys want to see a buggy game come check us out if you want to have like a fully polished experience, probably stay away because you're going to be annoyed.
So that's early access and you can expect that coming in a few weeks.
And then maybe there might be some opportunities for even earlier access to play the game for our operator NFT holders. I can't say much more than that, but I'll leave it there.
That's pretty cool. Sorry, I don't know if you want to go first. No, no, I was just gonna say Alex man you're knocking out all my questions.
I was looking through epic as gonna add it to my wish list and I saw that it says at the bottom of the search that last players will truly on the game. So does that mean that you will have a counterpart NFT for players to actually own the game.
How does that part work, not just like the assets, but the actual game itself will players truly own it.
Yeah, I think that statement is is focused on the model modability aspect of it. And so, of course, all of our skins and like customization in terms of vanity is going to be opened up and open source to our community such that like if you're a content creator if you're a guild if you're bat,
whatever you can come into our game design an insignia ultimately design a skin set and have control over that supply have control over how many ultimately you meant ultimately you sell in the marketplace and you get to decide how much it costs.
So that's like, hey, if you want a lot of people to have a lot of bad skins, great. If you want no one to have no bad skins also great you get to choose. And so really our community is going to get to control at least the cosmetic and vanity scene of it.
And so we're really excited about that empowering artists we're actually going to be working with some CS go skin artists actually to go ahead and create different gun skins and then they actually get to control the revenue there.
They also get creator royalties for any time that skin is traded on secondary as well so we're really excited there just because, you know, they've given us some indication that at least on the CS go side you know they, they would rather see some changes up in their compensation there.
So hopefully this can help align incentives, but what we're most excited for is our map editor and UGC creation tool in terms of we're giving our community and the entire world are triple a game as a platform to go ahead and express their creativity, create
whatever game modes they want to see create whatever game maps they want to see and ultimately be rewarded for that and so what that means is that you'll be able to create maps you'll be able to create game modes using our shrapnel game engine.
And we'll be, we'll give you different prefabs different templates, you know, ways to help you get started so you aren't starting from ground zero, but ultimately the ground vision of this is such that our community has the power, and has the incentives
as well to go ahead and create that next genre defining game, like how Dota was spawned from Warcraft three as a mod, and we gave like we talk about this all the time internally at our company you know we know that Blizzard would have loved to keep Icy
would have loved to keep Dota within their umbrella but ultimately Ice Frog had to go over to Valve and create Dota two, because the incentives weren't aligned there for him to get properly compensated for the contribution that he made not only to Warcraft, but to Blizzard
and the entire gaming genre and so what we're trying to do is make it so that hey if if that mod, if that game mode comes out of shrapnel, hopefully we can keep it within our ecosystem because we can align incentives.
So what that looks like ultimately is we want to give our give the world right the ability to recreate pub G within shrapnel if you want to, you know, team deathmatch experience or not team deathmatch a battle royale experience go for it.
If you want a five on five team deathmatch like a halo or a counter strike, you can go ahead and recreate that in our in our game as well.
We want to capture the flag king of the hill platforming that doesn't even have to do with gun play and stuff that we can't even imagine at this point, we want our community to be empowered to create whatever experience within shrapnel that they want to see so it's like if they don't even like extraction
shooters as a game type right, then it's like hey hopefully there's this entire other catalog of gameplay that they can go ahead and get into and have fun with, and still be interacting obviously with us at shrapnel.
So we have a grand vision there.
We think that we've hit success right once some UGC map or just UGC in general, is getting more playability than our main game mode that the studios is producing so once you know greater than 50% of play sessions and playtime is on player maps which we think can happen and will happen
if done properly, just look at Warcraft three, I guarantee you like people are playing way more dota than they were the main campaign.
We think that that will be successful and ultimately we've a lot we've created a system in which if you're that map creator that creates a map that's super popular in our game that's getting played the most, you're going to get rewarded
and trap token for that you know based on the the popularity and the playability so it's like hey you know if people are actually like on your map having fun, you should get rewarded on that and we're hoping that this motion.
Ultimately will spawn, you know that creative sort of zek guys from our community to create some sort of fun, you know riveting experience in that map editor.
And then hopefully you know when together as a community because you know we understand that with our grand vision right maybe we're not able to sort of achieve it on our own is just the studio with the extraction shooter.
So really, you know, are like how we're going to get to the the lofty position that we want to get to is we need to have a successful sort of mod community and really fun modded experiences.
So Alex real quick. So I guess would you say that's kind of like the differentiator for you guys versus a traditional, you know, first person shooter games is this, and the difference between say web two games and web three games is the ability to one not only
players be able to own, you know, different parts of the game and the NFTs and be able to trade those things which is awesome. And I get that but I guess also these a lot aligned incentives with builders that can create maps whatever it is that people
kind of play is that the main difference or is there something else as well.
No, yeah, you hit the nail on the head brother.
All right, good to know I understood what you're saying so.
And then also, real quick to you mentioned, you know, the early access and those things.
When is the early access and then when I guess is a plan to be, you know, open to public for the normal play. I think somebody asked that in the chat as well.
I, I am literally going to get the frickin word soon tattooed across my forehead, and I'm going to throw cups at my game team.
Every time someone asked me that question because literally there, they have ziplocked my mouth and said that I'm not allowed to speak specific dates, because there are no specific dates and I'll give you an example of why this happens in game design this weekend
where we're having a play test where we're testing out our Asia Pacific server. And there's a chance that that play test completely doesn't happen.
It can shit the bed once we, you know, load it up and you know matchmaking could work or can't work.
You know, and there's there's bugs and glitches people can't even get into the game who knows, or frickin go smooth and swimmingly it's like oh hey all these new features that we put into the game they're all of a sudden working and it's all smooth and great.
And then hey, if, if we have a really good play session this weekend right timelines are positive and we're able to sort of keep track. If they don't go so well, all of a sudden it's like, all right, what happened, we got to dig into it.
What do we need to fix how long is it going to take to fix this. And so there's so much ambiguity in the damn timeline that whenever I give specific dates, they're like, yeah, we can't do that.
And then all the web three people get mad at me because they're like, Alex, you said early access was in December. Why did you let all the developers go home and spend time with their family, you should have worked them like a sweatshop you promised us December.
And it's like okay well I guess we're not announcing dates anymore so we've been just saying q1 of 2024. We've had some illusions of you know, a few weeks a few whatever.
I'm saying like it's it's we're getting closer and closer. And obviously, as evident by these play tests as they get more successful we're going to be starting to open them up so that we can start stress testing our servers more and more.
And so that's why I was alluding to maybe our operators wink week will get an opportunity sooner than the extraction pack holders to be able to play test the game because we're slowly opening up that ring of testing before we go full into that early access.
And it's like, hey, you know, let's just stress test our server with all these 10s of thousands of players at once without doing, you know, some ramp up into that.
Right. So it's a gradual process and there's sort of steps that we have to accomplish to be able to get there. But I will say you know we're moving in a positive direction and you won.
So basically, you know, just just, you know, keep up to date on, you know, Twitter, Discord, you know, those kind of things and get the updates out. Okay.
I think Jay's got a bunch of other questions but I did want to ask one other real quick one if you don't mind sharing and I gave might be more of a personal take than a, you know, company take or something.
Why do you feel like, you know, the web to gaming community and gaming developers and companies, having jumped more into the web three NFT ownership that kind of thing.
What's your take on that.
Because to me it just makes sense but I'm a guy, but what would you take on why they've been so resistant.
Well, they all are watching and waiting on the sidelines, they are going to come in, as soon as we figure out the equation and someone shows them how it's done.
They're just, they innovators anymore. They're resting on their laurels they know what they got it's too risky to come into web three. And what you see is whenever there's a paradigm shift right whenever there's web gaming.
Whenever there's mobile gaming, right, with Supercell and clash of plans. What you see is that there's a native publisher that emerges as sort of the dominant innovator.
And we think, you know, that's the same case that's going to happen in web three where you're going to see someone emerging from web three that's sort of going to leave the charge.
And then you're going to have all the other publishers come on.
Once they see that success.
Love it. Yeah, appreciate you responding to that. That's it. That's a great take.
Thanks. Yeah, actually, Alex, this might be a good segue for you into telling us a little bit about game bridge, which I believe is a platform from the shrapnel team right that allows developer developer platform like helps developers on board web three features into games more seamlessly.
Could you elaborate a little bit on that tell us about it.
Oh, you've done your homework, Jenny, because not a lot of people know about Cambridge, because it's not, you know, a retail product.
But essentially, when we were building shrapnel, our game team, they're experts at building games, they got no idea what a wallet is what a token is what a NFT crypto, which, which a coin, whatever, you know, they're like, we don't we don't do blockchain,
dude, we do game dev. And so there's a real big disconnect and challenge at our studio of how do we get, you know, this blockchain integration into the game design sort of flow in a seamless way.
And so we ultimately had to do is we built our own infrastructure project to be able to do that so that we can modular we take out these blockchain components and basically bolt them on to different segments of our game code.
To be able to have all this talk and so we've commercialized that and are now licensing that to other publishers who might not have that domain expertise right there like hey you know we just want to focus on building the game.
We obviously want to enable blockchain features, but like we don't know where to start left right from center on the blockchain tech stuff.
So we're just trying to make it sort of a little easier in bridging that gap. That's why it's called game bridge.
It's not only for avalanche as well we you know it's it's basically any blockchain that you want to integrate into your sort of development is is our goal for making it so omni chain.
And we're really excited about it because it's literally a product of our own, you know, problem frustration and learnings of something that we ultimately are using now ourselves, and it didn't exist before so we built it.
And so we strongly believe that other teams will want to use it as well.
Stunning. I also just want to add that I first learned about game based through your medium, where you are someone from your team wrote a really beautiful year in review for shrapnel.
So I think I will tweet and pin this to the conversation here later when I'm not on the mic so everybody can go and check that out because the highlights from 2023 for shrapnel are incredible.
And I mean you've covered a lot of them today but it's a super interesting post not too long but yeah really powerful, and I wanted to circle back to some earlier topics of discussion real quick.
Well we have a few minutes left. I wanted to say that I love how community engagement and game modification and testing and feedback and open source are also fundamental to shrapnel development strategy.
I think that that's ultimately what is going to allow shrapnel to create a super impactful and valuable product and game for its users so props to that.
And I also wanted to ask about okay so you've spoken a little bit about shrapnel, well you spoke a lot actually about shrapnel's approach to storytelling earlier, which actually spans both digital and physical mediums.
And I don't even think we've brushed on the latter part yet so for example, you have an award winning live action short film and a comic book series as well.
Can you tell us a little bit about those and then how do these items contribute to the overall narrative and you know player connection to shrapnel.
Yeah, definitely. Um, so I think I mentioned it earlier about, you know, our CEO Mark long coming from HBO so he's just like a frickin story nut.
And so he just wants the community and the world to be able to explore the shrapnel universe, be outside of just the gameplay, because there's only so much of a story that you can tell within the game.
But, you know, I think, ultimately, it results in a much richer gameplay experience because there's so much depth to the world right it's not just like a standalone, you know, one off storyline it's literally like a history of, of, of the future.
And so, I think it's really powerful, what they're doing and it's just another way for if you know people get into the game or into shrapnel and they want to, you know, go see more of the world just like with Star Wars and and or and all their other spin off series.
You can go read the the comic books, you can go watch the live actions. And that's really good like our ultimate goal is we want to have, you know, TV shows, movies, and different ways for community to connect with shrapnel outside of just playing the game.
Hell yeah, that's awesome. And since we only have a couple of minutes left, I want to ask you a question about your work in particular. So you mentioned at the beginning of the call that you focus on partnerships.
And I think that you guys did a collaboration with alchemy for customized weapon skins, which, you know, showcases an interesting and unique approach to in game aesthetics.
What other partnerships have you worked on that enhance the shrapnel universe for players.
Yeah, I think all of our partnerships, we try to sort of enhance the experience for players, whether that's obviously, you know, whitelist and and whatever gifts that we can afford our holders.
But then also just making it a more lively experience within Discord. We have a lot of partnerships with other communities, obviously, with with bat is just starting.
But, you know, some of our more established like longer longer relationships with people like pudgy gaming or a lot of different organizations just gives our community the ability to, you know, activate and have fun like we're hosting a ton of game nights in our server.
And I think there's one actually tonight where we have orangey and Cairo, who are going to be playing shrapnel our shrapnel Fortnite map within our community together.
And so, you know, when we look at it, we try to obviously enhance the experience for our community through exciting ways and so whether that's, you know, just through whitelist and other or whatever.
But focused on like activation like game nights and tournaments and just where, you know, collaboration and fun can occur is really where we're trying to focus on.
I love that. And actually, that is a great place to leave off.
This was a super we're coming up on time anyway so this is this has been a super wonderful discussion. I think that we've all learned a lot about the shrapnel world and what's coming up.
And maybe we can remind everybody again about the extraction packs that we're going to be giving away to listeners today.
So guys, we mentioned earlier that if you share the link to the space, retweet us, we will be contacting you and offering you an extraction path that you can use to gain early access to the shrapnel game.
And what were some of the other perks included in the extraction pack again? Can you remind everyone?
Yeah, that's gonna have your first playable character, which is going to be NFT itself as well and then also a few different goodies and cosmetics and gears that you have your loaded out and ready to go for your first mission.
That is awesome. Well, thank you so much Alex for being here. This was a ton of fun and I'm really looking forward to some of the ways that we may be able to collab that community and shrapnel.
And of course, I just want to say, you know, thank you to Crypto Dojo for setting all this up, introducing us to the shrapnel team. And thank you to everybody on the panel who participated today.
Drew or Guillerm or Batterne or Alex, any last words, anything you want to share? Oh, actually, you know what? Hang on. I'll give it to Alex for a second. Anything that you want to share with the community that we didn't get to touch on today but that you feel is important to impart before we hop off?
No, I think we covered so much here. Thank you again, Jenny and Drew and everyone.
Crypto Dojo Scott, obviously for connecting and sending this up. I look forward to our continued relationship. Hopefully we can come on, do this again in the future, maybe once early access has come out and you can let us know how your experience was in the shrapnel game because we'd love to hear it.
But we were so thankful to come here. Thank you again for the invite, everyone listening and hearing me literally just word vomit all over you about shrapnel. You guys have to go take a shower to wash all that shill off.
So I apologize, but thank you for bearing with me and thank you everyone up here as well.
Oh my gosh, please. It was wonderful. You're such a colorful and enthusiastic speaker and the conversation was so interesting and I'm not a gamer by any stretch and I'm going to play shrapnel.
Like, I'm going to test it out now because this was such a colorful conversation. I enjoyed it so much. And I hope that the audience did too. Everybody throw down an emoji react for our wonderful guest, Alex, from shrapnel.
And don't forget to follow them. Retweet the space. Stay tuned for your extraction pack. Hop into their Discord. Hop into our Discord if you're not there yet. Discord.gg slash bad brigade.
And this will not be the last time that you're hearing from the bad community and shrapnel together. So stay tuned. Thank you so much, everybody, for your time this afternoon and we will see you in the next Twitter space.
See you guys. See you, everyone.
Take it easy, everybody, guys.